33 pages • 1 hour read
Farid ud-Din AttarThe Conference of the Birds
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 29-75Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 29-34 Summary
The poem begins with the birds of the world gathering at a conference to discuss if their species is in need of a king. The speaker welcomes several types of birds individually, starting with the hoopoe. The speaker names the hoopoe as guide of the other birds, noting that the biblical King Solomon trusted the hoopoe to carry messages to the Queen of Sheba. The speaker then addresses many other birds present at the conference and implores each of them to take their impending spiritual journey.
The birds have assembled in order to find a king for their nation. They reason that every nation must have a king, and in order to have a justly run government, they must have a Sovereign leader, too. The birds begin to argue the best way to procure a king when the hoopoe comes forward. He tells the conference that he comes to them with a divine purpose and details all the ways in which he is trustworthy. He then says that they already have a king, the Simorgh, and though he lives far away, he is always near the birds. The hoopoe describes the majesty of the Simorgh, and asks the birds to carefully consider the arduousness of the journey to find the Sovereign before joining the hoopoe on his quest.
At first, the birds are enthusiastic to join the hoopoe in his search for the Simorgh. When they begin to consider the length of the journey, however, they hesitate, and each bird comes up with an excuse to decline the journey.
Pages 35-50 Summary
The birds individually make excuses to the hoopoe to stay behind from the journey, and the hoopoe counters each excuse with a story. The nightingale speaks first, saying that he is too in love with the rose to leave her side. The hoopoe counters that this is a superficial love and tells him the story of a dervish and a princess. A princess smiled at a lowly dervish, causing him to believe she was in love. When her men come to kill him, the princess tells the dervish she smiled at him out of pity, not out of love, and then disappears into smoke.
The parrot makes the excuse that she only desires to find the stream of immortality guarded by Khezr, a figure of pre-Islamic legends, and has no interest in finding the Simorgh. The hoopoe answers that it is not noble to be so short-sighted in one’s goals, and tells a story about Khezr. A companion tells Khezr they cannot be friends because they have different goals: Khezr chooses to hold onto immortality and the companion chooses freedom in death.
The peacock tells the hoopoe he has already seen Paradise, or Eden, and will wait for a guide to show him the way back. The hoopoe says they seek a truth like “a shoreless sea” (40) and the peacock’s paradise is merely a drop in that sea. He tells him a story of Adam, where a master explains to a pupil that Adam could only truly know Heaven’s grace if he left Eden.
The duck says she cannot leave the purity of her home in the water for the Simorgh. The hoopoe questions the duck’s ideas of purity. The partridge says its only desire is to discover precious stones, but the hoopoe counters that “to the wise [they] are not worth a straw,” (42) and tells a story of King Solomon’s ring, which compromised his spiritual progress. The homa, a mythical bird whose shadow was said to fall on a future king, says he holds too much power for the Simorgh to have any significance to him. The hoopoe counters him by calling him a slave to vanity and tells the story of King Mahmoud, who has no majesty in death and wishes he had been a beggar instead.
This discourse continues with further excuses of power, greed, earthly love, and physical weakness, and the hoopoe discounts each one with a fable.
Pages 51-75 Summary
The other birds protest and the hoopoe tells them of their relationship with the Simorgh. He says all of their excuses to stay behind were “inappropriate and lame,” (51) and few beings are as worthy of the Simorgh’s throne as they. The birds, speaking again as one body, call themselves a “wretched, flimsy crew” (51) and say they are not worthy of taking this journey. The hoopoe counters that every bird in the land is the Simorgh’s shadow and his grace is reflected in their hearts, but they cannot yet see this. The hoopoe tells them three fables to prove his point, each concerning a different king. The first king is nameless, but so filled with grace that his subjects could not look upon his image. The king commanded mirrors to be placed on the palace walls so that his subjects could see him. The hoopoe tells the birds to make their hearts a mirror and search for the king there. The second king is Alexander the Great, who dresses up as a messenger and is ignored by his subjects. The hoopoe faults the subjects for not recognizing their king. The third is King Mahmoud, who asks a servant to look after his ill slave, Ayaz, but appears next to Ayaz when the servant arrives, citing a secret, unfathomable bond between the two.
These fables give the birds confidence and they are eager to set off again. They ask the hoopoe how they should proceed, and he tells them that they must renounce the constructs of the Self as well as cultural constructs. They should “forget what is and is not Islam” (57). The hoopoe launches into the lengthy story of Sheikh Sam’an, a prominent and devout sheikh who renounces Islam when he falls in love with a young Christian girl. She commands him to drink wine, herd swine, and burn the Koran to prove his love, and his followers are astonished by his sacrilege. He returns to Islam and is re-purified, despite his sins, and the Christian girl dies trying to decipher the mysteries of Islam. The hoopoe concludes the story by saying that true beliefs are always at war with the “muddied Self” (72).
Pages 29-75 Analysis
The opening of this poem introduces the characters and their motivations, and establishes the narrative structure used throughout the poem. As with many epic poems, this one relies on structural parallelism and repetitive metaphors to create continuity. The speaker introduces the hoopoe: “You will be our guide;/It was on you King Solomon relied” (29) Although the birds do not officially adopt the hoopoe as their leader until much later, the establishment of the hoopoe as leader from the onset also communicates the speaker’s omniscience. The end rhyme employed—“guide” and “relied”—evokes trustworthiness, especially in the context of King Solomon, who is a major prophet according to the Koran.
The speaker continues to welcome many different species of birds and uses their welcome to describe their preoccupations with “the Self,” which is portrayed as an obstacle to enlightenment. Each bird’s description is also heavily laden with biblical allusions, and the speaker often uses a particular biblical figure to guide the bird on its spiritual path. The nightingale, for example, is asked to “sing as David did” and use song to “guide home men’s suffering” (33). The speaker compares the bird to the biblical King David of Israel, whose figurative song is known in the Hebrew bible as the Book of Psalms. The speaker then compares the nightingale’s Self to a thick, impenetrable coat of chainmail, and tells the nightingale to use King David’s “holy zeal” to melt down its steel. The speaker continues the analogy by highlighting that the Self melts with love, as chainmail does with fire. King David is an Islamic prophet, a figure that already reached enlightenment, that the nightingale (and, by association, the reader) should use for spiritual guidance. In addition to the Self, the speaker also often references “Reality” in the birds’ introductions as a concept that can only be reached when the Self is gone and only God remains.
The primary reasons the birds cite for seeking a king is that all other nations require one. Since this is a conference of birds, and not humans, their searching for a king already seems absurd; they are trying to fit into a purely human convention for its own sake. Using birds to confront problems of humanity creates distance for the reader to question societal conventions, including political systems.
When the birds begin to make excuses to stay behind on the journey to the Simorgh, Attar invokes the narrative structure that carries a large part of the poem: one bird speaks to the hoopoe, the hoopoe answers, and then explains his answer with a fable or biblical story. The birds’ excuses translate clearly to the hesitations, vices, failures, and fears of humanity. The partridge, for example, says, “My life is here; I have no wish to fly:/ I must discover precious stones or die” (42). The partridge, therefore, represents humanity’s greed and obsession with wealth. The hoopoe counters this excuse by saying that precious stones “are nothing more/than stones—and to the wise not worth a straw” (42), which counters the partridge’s perception of wealth and, therefore, the reader’s perception of wealth. The hoopoe furthers his point with the story of the ring of King Solomon, in which Solomon’s ring brought him palpable power in life, but in death, Solomon’s possession of the ring works against him. The story does not deny that there is earthly power to wealth but warns that it hinders even prophets in the afterlife.
The stories invoked by the hoopoe often challenge social or political conventions, often speaking of the failures of kings. Religious conventions are also challenged, as in the case of the story of Sheikh Sam’an. The Sheikh has a relationship with a Christian girl that is equated with blasphemy, but he returns to Islam unpunished. Attar situates blasphemy as a positive quality when it deepens a relationship and understanding of God, regardless of the religious rules enforced by Islamic society.
